The Return of the Soldier (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics) - Softcover

West, Rebecca

Softcover

ISBN 10: 014118065X ISBN 13: 9780141180656

Publisher: Penguin Group, 1998

Synopsis

World War I, in the background of Rebecca West's first novel, was "the first war that women could imagine, " writes Samuel Hynes in his eloquent introduction, "and so it was the first that a woman could write into a novel." Narrated by a woman who, like West, has never experienced war and yet for whom the war was very real, The Return of the Soldier (1918) takes place not on a battlefield, but in an isolated country house. It examines the relationships between three women and a soldier suffering from shell shock. This novel of an enclosed world invaded by public events also embodies in its characters the shifts in England's class structures at the beginning of the twentieth century, as well as the choice between the romantic past and the horrifying present, between love and reality.

About this title

Review:

"Brilliant . . . [West was] an artist who wrote wonderful prose, who took chances with language and cadence, and who wrote poetically, even of prosaic subjects."
--The New Republic

Book Description:

This is a masterful novel about a shell-shocked, amnesiac soldier returning from WWI to the three women who love him.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Group
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 014118065X
• ISBN 13: 9780141180656
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 112